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His restaurant, Buccan, the reigning culinary beacon in Palm Beach, hosted four other stellar chefs, including the James Beard award-winning best chef in the South, Stephen Stryjewski.

“The First Bite” kicked off a food festival that has quietly become one of the hottest in the country among true food lovers.

At one point in the kitchen, there was a James Beard winner (Stryjewski), a runner up (Conley), a Top Chef Masters star (Anita Lo), a Food and Wine magazine best new chef (Jonathon Sawyer), a global restaurateur chef (Ken Oringer) — and in the audience, a Chopped champion (Giorgio Rapicavoli) and another Top Chef finalist (Lindsay Autry).

It was a chef’s chef kind of event.

“Chefs talk. It’s a small community,” said Stryjewski, who has come to the festival four years in a row because of the “high caliber” of chefs and food.

Stryjewski likes that the audience — which included the Tampa Bay Buccaneers owners — were not here to gorge on food and drink, but to appreciate delicately crafted dishes and personally meet the star chefs who prepared them.

“These people that come here are interested in the food,” he said.

Stryjewski prepared all the appetizers, including a boudin ball. (Imagine a perfectly crisp, round croquette stuffed with pork and creamy rice).

The meal played out like improvised lyrics to “anything you can do/I can do better,” with none of the back-biting and all of the grandeur.

Stryjewski helped plate Lo’s mackerel crudo. They all fawned over Oringer’s oysters escabeche. When Sawyer found black truffles (read: prohibitively expensive) in Conley pantry during the service of his quail — and deep into a few beers for all the chefs, Conley said — he had it shaved over the medallions tableside, and Lo herself helped do it.

“We always have a good time. Laugh, crack open a few beers,” said Conley.

After serving his decadent spiced Colorado lamb — a shoulder wrapped in lamb belly, with a side of his so-labeled “hot ass Harissa” sauce — he staggered smiling and disheveled to sit with his pregnant wife, Averill, for a few minutes at a table in the middle of his laid-back restaurant.

It was the kind of event where diners could have long conversations tableside over the origins of Cajun and creole cuisine with Stryjewski, who is Louisiana’s acting food-historian at his ground-breakng restaurant Cochon.

And it was also the kind of party where two of the best chefs around, Café Boulud executive chef Rick Mace and sous chef Jimmy Strine, could show up in denim jackets and rugged boots after a long night of prep for their own Sunday event with Daniel Boulud just to hang with chef pals and show off the iPhone pictures of the dishes they designed. (They might even bring their own PBRs tucked into their coats.)

Because it was that kind of opening night — one that shifted to a chef’s after party well beyond midnight at the Four Seasons Palm Beach for homemade meatballs — a bacchanalia that refused to end.